Conclusion

What does it mean to say that Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon’s poetry accords a special value to obsoleteness, against the backdrop of the etymological fallacy? Obsoleteness demonstrates that language is always in contention, thus destabilising both the poet’s seeming control of language and their critics’ seeming penetration of it. But the speculation, difficulty, and pedantry that is the result does not abstract this poetry beyond use: rather, its appreciation of obsoleteness constitutes a new commitment to the uses of language poetic form leaves behind, turning etymological virtuosity into poetic virtue. By way of Derrida and a recent book on Auden by Andrew W. Hass, this study is brought full circle: coming to terms with obsoleteness is understood as a coming to terms with synchrony, which gave the etymological fallacy the momentum Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon carry through into poems that show us how language is both always beyond them and constantly being reclaimed.

Lyric Diction in J. H. Prynne

Pearls That Were is an anomaly in Prynne’s oeuvre; it whole-heartedly adopts a Romantic lyric diction that is only used in a fragmentary way elsewhere in his poetry. Such a characteristic diction—a ‘lightness ready-made’, as Prynne once wrote—raises questions of inheritance, and there are many echoes of the Romantic poets in the collection. This chapter considers the different ways in which sustained and fragmentary lyricism (in both poetry and criticism) can avoid the manoeuvre that Clifford Siskin termed the ‘lyric turn’, which exploits a ‘lightness ready-made’. Instead, Prynne reclaims this diction by giving it back its historical weight.

W. H. Auden’s Paysages Etymologisés

Adapting contemporary psychological, sociological, and religious theories of human consciousness, Auden repeatedly tells the story of how the invention of language radically altered our relationships with the natural world. These contexts are used to examine the role of etymology—and specifically the concrete etymologies of abstract words—in Auden’s moralised landscapes, which are the settings for his stories about the origin of language. Etymological analyses identify dialogues between past and present meanings—for example, of the words ‘rival’ and ‘savage’—that illuminate Auden’s concern with ‘the relation of man as a history-making person to nature’.

Introduction

Etymology has been linked to poetry in various ways since the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with theory—from formalist understandings of etymology’s role in ambiguity through the contested place of philology in modern literary criticism to poststructuralist interpretations of etymology as a purely rhetorical category—this chapter surveys the use of etymology in critical practice. It also introduces the ‘etymological poetry’ of Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon through examples of their ‘self-inwoven etymologies’. Finally, a version of Paula Blank’s theory of the ‘quasi-disciplinarity of etymological desire’ is proposed: for poets who suspend its force between critical discovery and poetic invention, etymology can address profound tensions that lie at the heart of the use of language as an artistic medium.

Paul Muldoon’s Onomastics

This chapter explores Muldoon’s use of names, of both people and places, in the contexts of Northern Irish conflict and traditional Irish name lore. It addresses the political and poetic implications of Muldoon’s commitment to the proverb nomen est omen, focusing on instances of dinnseanchas, charactonymy, prosopopoeia, the transferral of names, and name translation. Naming is an etymological event in the sense that names are chosen from a language for a new purpose; their subsequent relationship to that language is paradoxical, as Derrida shows in ‘Des Tours de Babel’. In Muldoon, any temptation to interpret names from within the language—to see names as omens—is itself ominous.

The Lexical Exercises of W. H. Auden

This chapter takes its title from ‘A Bad Night (A Lexical Exercise)’, which establishes an ambiguity between the poem as a communicative and a philological entity. With reference to formalist theories and their critiques, an investigation is made of Auden’s understanding of philology as ‘the most poetical of all scholastic disciplines’ in relation to his use of obscure diction, particularly in his later poetry. This diction resists all attempts to read it as a method of obstructing or facilitating communication; rather, its historicity makes communication possible (with the help of the OED) without guaranteeing its efficacy.

Reading J. H. Prynne with ‘Mental Ears’

In 1973, Donald Davie attributed the famous difficulty of Prynne’s poetry to its etymological ‘logic’. More recently, Prynne himself proposed that we read poetry with ‘mental ears’, listening for latent etymological connections. This chapter considers how etymology can be used to read Prynne’s poems, focusing specifically on morphological patterns such as the splitting of words across line endings and the repetition of roots or affixes. Such patterns are consistent across Prynne’s large and varied oeuvre; detailed readings are given here of The White Stones (1969), Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), and Kazoo Dreamboats (2011). These readings find that Prynne’s poetic language communicates on the boundary between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, where every word disrupts and is disrupted by its history.

Paul Muldoon the ‘Etymological Junkie’

‘Who knew forensic derives from forum?’, Muldoon asks in a recently published poem. His compulsive etymologising challenges audiences to see both the relevance and the irrelevance of etymology to interpretation, thereby accepting that they are the ultimate arbiters of Muldoon’s linguistic forensics. Following an analysis of how audience responses to etymologies are cued in his criticism, this chapter reflects on the connection that seems to exist between etymologising and elegising in Muldoon’s poetry to characterise the effect of what Paula Blank calls the ‘“etymological moment” in contemporary critical practice’ when it occurs in the poetry itself.